ABSTRACT
This chapter maps how health promotions and online web resources targeting people who live with HIV provide narratives of so-called ‘positive living’ messages. Positive living, as Benton et al. state, may mean ‘disclosing one’s HIV-positive status to potential sexual partners, family members and friends; practicing “safer sex”; eating well and abstaining from drinking and smoking; and regularly taking medications. More intangibly, positive living, as the name suggests, also requires a marked positive change in attitude and self-perceptions and demonstrable levels of self-sufficiency, responsibility and expressed concern about self-care among HIV-positive people’. The chapter connects this insight with a focus on neoliberalism and argues that, in the era of ‘ending AIDS’, health promotions that address people living with HIV (PLHIV) balances between playing on disciplinary notions of subjection to biomedical adherence and, on the other hand, a much more neoliberal notion of security wherein positive living also signifies a return to ‘normal’. The chapter, in the final analysis, draws out the three ‘categories’ – suppression, disclosing and surviving – as part of a discourse where empowerment meets neoliberalism and where discipline meets freedom. In the era of the end of AIDS, what positive living campaigns do needs to be critically analyzed not as a negative analysis of access to and use of ARVs, but rather to tease out what ‘problems’ such health promotions address and what behavior they encourage. Conversely, how certain behaviors become normative and desirable, while others are shunned or discouraged.
